by Annika Gödde | 11. March 2025
As social media platforms increasingly take on roles and responsibilities traditionally associated with nation states, new frameworks to evaluate their fragility must be developed. Using The Fund For Peace’s Fragile State Index as a model, Haythornthwaite, Mai & Gruzd (2024) articulated the Social Media Fragility Indicators, a set of indicators to measure and evaluate the fragility of social media platforms. Building on this, the working group will discuss and refine the proposed indicators. The overarching goal is to develop a robust framework that can provide prescient insights into the long-term viability of platforms, inform strategic interventions, and highlight cross-platform issues.
To advance this work, the working group will convene a set of international experts from diverse fields to evaluate the sources of social media fragility, refine the initial set of indicators of social media fragility, and devise measures to assess the fragility of social media platforms based on these indicators.
The workshop outcomes in the form of a summary report will be shared on the working group’s page. We will also pursue a panel submission to disseminate the workshop results at relevant conferences such as the International Conference on Social Media & Society and Trust & Safety.
by Annika Gödde | 4. February 2025
How is artificial intelligence reshaping the way political parties operate, engage with citizens, and lead in democratic systems? Our working group, Rethinking Party Politics: The Impact of AI on Governance, Membership, and Leadership, tackles this critical question. We bring together leading scholars in party politics, AI ethics, and democracy studies to explore AI’s transformative influence on political strategy, grassroots mobilization, and decision-making processes. Through interdisciplinary dialogue, expert presentations, and hands-on scenario planning, we’ll investigate how AI impacts political parties using Katz and Mair’s (1993) three-level framework: the party in public office, the party on the ground, and the party central office. Despite the rapid growth of research on AI and democracy, few studies have focused on its impact on political parties key actors in representative systems. By addressing this gap, we aim to make a significant contribution to understanding the future of political organizations in the age of AI, inspiring further scholarship.
by Maurice Tietze | 29. October 2024
Our working group aims to bring together a variety of leading scholars from different disciplines and countries to study how industrial policy is actually done in Europe and beyond, and what the specific role of technology is therein. This promises not only to significantly advance the existing and rapidly growing literature on industrial policy and digital policy-making. It will also have practical relevance for the effectiveness and legitimacy of industrial and digital policy.
by Annika Gödde | 13. June 2024
The discourse on artificial intelligence (AI) is heavily focussed on text-to-text generators such as chat GPT. Less attention is paid to generative visual communication, which is currently gaining in popularity: AI images can be generated effortlessly with tools such as Stable Diffusion and are already being used in many contexts without their origin being obvious to the viewer. These images have the potential to fundamentally change the production, use and reception of images. The planned working group aims to close this gap and examine the topic of AI-generated images in a multidisciplinary way. In five workshops (three face-to-face, two virtual), we will analyse the characteristics and challenges of generative images (object-centred perspective), the production and presentation contexts (communicator-centred perspective) and the reception and media competence of users (reception- and usage-oriented perspective). The results will be presented in scientific publications and at a specialist conference. In addition, we are drawing up guidelines on the ethical use of generative images and are endeavouring to perpetuate the collaboration and obtain further funding.
by Maurice Tietze | 11. June 2024
Since the 1990s, politicians, policymakers, scholars, technical experts and representatives of the private sector and civil society have been discussing and struggling over the role of the state in the global governance of digital networks. During the early 2000s, and...
